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Dallas Eakins, left, walks in with his wife actress Ingrid Kavelaars, right, prior to being announced as the new Edmonton Oilers' head coach at Rexall Place in Edmonton, Alta. on Monday, June 10, 2013. Amber Bracken/Edmonton Sun/QMI Agency

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Back in the 1970s a little boy followed his mother and stepfather around wherever they went. When his stepfather, Jim, a long haul truck driver decided to return to fastball in a recreational league in Peterborough the eight-year-old kid tagged along as the team’s batboy.

His determined and proud mom Carol sat in the stands watching her husband and son on hot Sunday afternoons, waiting patiently after games as the ball diamond boys had a few pops, and her son collected the empties for a weekly cash injection.

The polite boy was himself quite an athlete who would turn out to be a better one than any of the beer league boys he watched those Sunday afternoons.

Dallas Eakins (that’s pronounced Aikens) arrived in Peterborough from his birthplace Florida as a young boy after Jim had met Carol then brought them to his hometown to live and become a family along with Dallas’s sister. Jim was a tough, no nonsense, but fun loving man who grew up in East City’s Swanson Avenue.

Just like Jim had, Dallas became one of the thousands of the local boys playing baseball in the summer and Mark Street house league hockey in the winter, although not one of the boys who had learned to skate on outdoor rinks as his buddies had when they were only three and four.

Jim and Carol attended every game he played. Jim’s old friend Peter (Bubs) McCarthy coached the peewee Petes and asked his buddy to help him as an assistant coach and trainer. Dallas at 12 was a tall 5’8” kid, and sometimes joined them on the ice at practice. Pete thought Jim should bring him out to the AAA tryouts.

“Jim didn’t think he was ready for all star, but I thought he was big enough and with some coaching would improve. By Christmas he fit right in. He was always willing to listen and learn.”

The team had future NHL defenceman Steve Chiasson, and present Lakers coach Jamie Batley as well as two other future NHLers Herb Raglan and Glen Seabrooke. Dallas was one of the hardest working players, and as Bubs says “who didn’t misbehave. He was a great kid who had great support from his parents.”

“He was quiet but in the dressing room if things were getting out of hand, he would tell the guys to get their minds back on hockey.”

He was a team, character player, a “gentlemen’s hockey player” says Bubs not meaning that he wasn’t tough on the ice because he was, nor that he didn’t spend some time in the sin box, because he did, but he cared about the game.

It was while becoming a teenager that he got a job at Roger Neilson’s hockey camp. Roger got him more interested in improving his game. Dallas worked hard enough that he eventually made Dick Todd’s Petes on the same teams as future NHLers Luke Richardson, now a top AHL coach, Jody Hull, the Petes new coach, Tie Domi, Kris King, Mike Ricci, and present board member Dave Lorentz. In 1987 Dallas was named Petes captain and the team’s best defenceman that season.

Jeff Twohey, who spent close to three decades with the Petes, called him the best captain the team ever had.

“This isn’t demeaning any of the others in any way,” he told me in 2003. “But Dallas was special. He was a great leader. He was a hard worker, loyal, tough, and never afraid to confront people. He knew how to keep players in line.

“When he was joining us at 17 or 18, he was already a man. With the ability he came to us with he shouldn’t have had a career in the pros, but he worked at it. He would listen, he would practice. If Dick told him he needed work in a certain area, he would focus on it and work on that area. He wasn’t a guy who would say one thing and do another.”

He didn’t whine nor quit. In 1985 he was drafted in the 10th round by Washington starting a pro career that took him to four leagues, almost two dozen teams, eight of those in the NHL for 120 games scoring no goals and nine assists. He didn’t just learn from successful people but those who could have but didn’t have success. He watched how they wasted it away. He ended his career in 2004 as Manitoba Moose captain.

The now 46-year-old father of two girls has changed in many ways, fitter today than he was even as a player, more mature mentally and physically and married to Ingrid who trained hard to once become runner up to Miss Teen Canada. He still has that strong discipline, commitment and loyalty taught throughout his life. Jim, Carol and Roger have passed away but they believed in him, taught him what it took to be a man, but it was Dallas who did what it took to be one.

"I am somebody who firmly believes that if you’re talented, just being talented is not enough,” he told a press conference on Monday when he was named head coach of the Edmonton Oilers, fulfilling a dream he has had to be an NHL head coach. If his players are not fit, they will be, or they won’t be his players.

“I’m so happy for him,” says Bubs, who still has the 8 x 10 inch glossy the kid sent him when Dallas put on his first NHL uniform with the Winnipeg Jets which included his signature and a note thanking him for his time.

“He’s a nice kid, one of those true gentlemen of the game.”

Dallas Eakins deserves what he is receiving. He is a great example for young people when making work and lifestyle choices. You can either choose to whine and be lazy or put the pedal to the metal, not waiting for your dream to come to you, but chasing it with the intestinal fortitude and discipline that reality, and the Dallas Eakins’s of the world, choose to do.

*****

Former Examiner managing editor Ed Arnold has followed Eakins’s career, and was a member of the fastball team when he was the batboy.